


Strange Form of Life

by nigeltde



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ficlet, M/M, post 7.17 The Born Again Identity, season 7
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 15:44:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20066494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: backwards, forwards





	Strange Form of Life

**Author's Note:**

> title stolen from the Bonnie "Prince" Billy song. Thanks be to [zmediaoutlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadlybride/pseuds/deadlybride).

Redwoods near the coast. Cavernous. The dusk caught up to them fast, and the chill, ferns rustling under their flashlights and an indignant hoo high in the canopy. Sam keeps his head down and his numb feet on the move. All this way for new cards and names but at the cabin Dean snaps on the light and says Well, great, in a flat vexed voice, plucking a note from under the sugar bowl: He’ll be a week. Sam hums, turns away and heaves the door shut on the resounding crickets. Sets his bag on the couch and watches Dean stuff his worry under a feeble smile and say Guess we’re here then.

Sam nods, cracks his neck up at the rafters, still pockmarked with notches from knife practice, soothed by the passage of a decade plus years, and says Guess we are. He feels nothing about it. He was living with the devil in his head for a good long while before this. He’s five days clear. He’s got nothing to feel. He dozes a lot; as much as he can.

He folds himself into the mattress as Dean pokes around, calling status updates. The place is improved since they were last deposited here, stowed, briefly fatherless. They have hot water if not an actual shower. A stacked woodpile. Booze. A fold-out to complement the bed. Cans in the cupboards and something about a cellar as Sam fades down into a sunken dark boneless ageless sleep and rises again incrementally, creaks his eyes open to the dawn, coffee and pine in the air and Dean watching him still over the rim of a tin mug, soft-eyed and blurred in the dim grey light, unthinkably bare and unsure in only his t-shirt. Turning the mug in his hands, frowning at it. Sam had dreamed of his brother again, in the trees, these trees, here, all of them the same but him young again with needles in his hair, shadowing out of the fog gasping Sam’s name into the curve of his neck and his rabbiting heart. They’d fooled around here the first time, terrified, and the second, and the third, four weeks of deep summer trying each other out in every patch of travelling sun, damp corner, tree-crook, clearing, hard-sprung bed and the ripe and spongy ground, buried in the brake. They’d tried to take it with them and failed. That’s life. Sam has regrets but not that.

The fog might come in right through the seams of the cabin and the cockroaches might brave the day and the ocean might rise until it carries them cabin and deer and forest and all, foaming, into the end of things. The world arrives as it will. They’re together. A corkscrew feeling keeps trying to lever open Sam’s chest. 

Guess we’re here then he says, voice rough from disuse and the twisting pain under his ribs and his aching feet and shoulders and back. Dean sucks his teeth a moment and says carefully Guess we are, meets and holds his gaze, and they breathe like that a moment until a smile stretches slow across Dean’s face, brilliant and white and Sam’s heart thumps, loses way and starts again, flush rising in his cheeks and outside birdsong thrilling the small trees and the whole infinite dawn crying awake, awake. Awaken.

**Author's Note:**

> feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
> rebloggable [tumblr post](https://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/186690876301/strange-form-of-life) for those so inclined.


End file.
